March 11, 2009

Come See Us at SIGCHI 2009

We at Autodesk are pleased to be having our largest presence ever at SIGCHI in 2009. Not only are we a Champion Sponsor (more on that at a later date), but we have six people presenting this year on a variety of topics.

Lillian Smith and Greg Demchak are showing Project Chicago: Green Researchin the Video Showcase on Tuesday, from 6:30 to 8:00pm. Their video showcases a highly graphic, interactive technology concept for evaluating water and energy reduction, indoor environmental quality, and carbon footprint impacts and giving designers an immediate sense of the results of different building designs. This proposed sustainability dashboard concept is demonstrated on a 6’x3’ touch screen to explore its potential use as a collaborative tool. The dashboard is presented by Autodesk as a technology concept; it is not a commercially available product.

Lynn Miller and Desiree Sy are holding an Agile User Experience SIG on Wednesday from 9 to 10:30am. The goal of this SIG is to draw upon the shared experience of UX practitioners to uncover the best practices for agile user-centered design which facilitate optimal product development.

Lira Nikolovska, Greg Demchak and Matt Jezyk are presenting two papers as part of Designing for Discovery on Wednesday from 4:30 to 6:00pm. The first paper, Simplified User Interfaces for Design and User Testing of Architecture Software Applications, describes the value of creating simplified user interfaces for use in early conceptual design phases. By simplifying the interface, the team was able to solicit specific feedback about new tools without the overhead or pre-conceptions associated with using an existing software platform. As a result, the team was able to iterate rapidly on specific problems. The second paper, Understanding User Needs for Conceptual Design Phases of Architecture Projects, describes design research methods used to understand user needs, identify user requirements and create new conceptual design workflows for an existing architectural software application.

And last but not least, Autodesk employee Chauncey Wilson is a member of the organizing committee for the User Experience and Usability community.